_ _ _ ____
_ _ _ __| |_ ____ _| |_ ___| |__ |___ \
| | | | '__| \ \ /\ / / _` | __/ __| '_ \ __) |
| |_| | | | |\ V V / (_| | || (__| | | | / __/
\__,_|_| |_| \_/\_/ \__,_|\__\___|_| |_| |_____|
... monitors webpages for you
urlwatch is intended to help you watch changes in webpages and get notified (via e-mail, in your terminal or through various third party services) of any changes. The change notification will include the URL that has changed and a unified diff of what has changed.
urlwatch 2 requires:
The dependencies can be installed with (add --user to install to $HOME):
python3 -m pip install pyyaml minidb requests keyring appdirs lxml cssselect
Optional dependencies (install via python3 -m pip install <packagename>):
- Pushover reporter: chump
- Pushbullet reporter: pushbullet.py
- Matrix reporter: matrix_client, markdown2
- Stdout reporter with color on Windows: colorama
- "browser" job kind: requests-html
- Unit testing: pycodestyle
- Start
urlwatchto migrate your old data or start fresh - Use
urlwatch --editto customize your job list - Use
urlwatch --edit-configif you want to set up e-mail sending - Use
urlwatch --edit-hooksif you want to write custom subclasses - Add
urlwatchto your crontab (crontab -e)
Quickly adding new URLs to the job list from the command line:
urlwatch --add url=http://example.org,name=Example
You can pick only a given HTML element with the built-in filter, for
example to extract <div id="something">.../<div> from a page, you
can use the following in your urls.yaml:
url: http://example.org/
filter: element-by-id:somethingAlso, you can chain filters, so you can run html2text on the result:
url: http://example.net/
filter: element-by-id:something,html2textThe example urls.yaml file also demonstrates the use of built-in filters, here 3 filters are used: html2text, line-grep and whitespace removal to get just a certain info field from a webpage:
url: https://thp.io/2008/urlwatch/
filter: html2text,grep:Current.*version,stripFor most cases, this means that you can specify a filter chain in your urls.yaml page without requiring a custom hook where previously you would have needed to write custom filtering code in Python.
If you are using the grep filter, you can grep for a comma (,)
by using \054 (: does not need to be escaped separately and
can be used as-is), for example to convert HTML to text, then grep
for a,b:, and then strip whitespace, use this:
url: https://example.org/
filter: html2text,grep:a\054b:,stripIf you want to extract only the body tag you can use this filer:
url: https://thp.io/2008/urlwatch/
filter: element-by-tag:bodyYou can also specify an external diff-style tool (a tool that takes
two filenames (old, new) as parameter and returns on its standard output
the difference of the files), for example to use GNU wdiff to get
word-based differences instead of line-based difference:
url: https://example.com/
diff_tool: wdiffNote that diff_tool specifies an external command-line tool, so that
tool must be installed separately (e.g. apt install wdiff on Debian or
brew install wdiff on macOS). Coloring is supported for wdiff-style
output, but potentially not for other diff tools.
To filter based on an XPath
expression, you can use the xpath filter like so (see Microsoft's
XPath Examples
page for some other examples):
url: https://example.net/
filter: xpath:/bodyThis filters only the <body> element of the HTML document, stripping
out everything else.
To filter based on a CSS selector,
you can use the css filter like so:
url: https://example.net/
filter: css:bodySome limitations and extensions exist as explained in cssselect's documentation.
In some cases, it might be useful to ignore (temporary) network errors to
avoid notifications being sent. While there is a display.error config
option (defaulting to True) to control reporting of errors globally, to
ignore network errors for specific jobs only, you can use the
ignore_connection_errors key in the job list configuration file:
url: https://example.com/
ignore_connection_errors: trueSimilarly, you might want to ignore some (temporary) HTTP errors on the server side:
url: https://example.com/
ignore_http_error_codes: 408, 429, 500, 502, 503, 504or ignore all HTTP errors if you like:
url: https://example.com/
ignore_http_error_codes: 4xx, 5xxFor web pages with misconfigured HTTP headers or rare encodings, it may be useful to explicitly specify an encoding from Python's Standard Encodings.
url: https://example.com/
encoding: utf-8You can configure urlwatch to send real time notifications about changes
via Pushover(https://pushover.net/). To enable this, ensure you have the
chump python package installed (see DEPENDENCIES). Then edit your config
(urlwatch --edit-config) and enable pushover. You will also need to add
to the config your Pushover user key and a unique app key (generated by
registering urlwatch as an application on your Pushover account(https://pushover.net/apps/build)
Pushbullet notification are configured similarly to Pushover (see above). You'll need to add to the config your Pushbullet Access Token, which you can generate at https://www.pushbullet.com/#settings
Telegram notifications are configured using the Telegram Bot API. For this, you'll need a Bot API token and a chat id (see https://core.telegram.org/bots). Sample configuration:
telegram:
bot_token: '999999999:3tOhy2CuZE0pTaCtszRfKpnagOG8IQbP5gf' # your bot api token
chat_id: '88888888' # the chat id where the messages should be sent
enabled: trueTo set up Telegram, from your Telegram app, chat up BotFather (New Message,
Search, "BotFather"), then say /newbot and follow the instructions.
Eventually it will tell you the bot token (in the form seen above,
<number>:<random string>) - add this to your config file.
You can then click on the link of your bot, which will send the message /start.
At this point, you can use the command urlwatch --telegram-chats to list the
private chats the bot is involved with. This is the chat ID that you need to put
into the config file as chat_id. You may add multiple chat IDs as a YAML list:
telegram:
bot_token: '999999999:3tOhy2CuZE0pTaCtszRfKpnagOG8IQbP5gf' # your bot api token
chat_id:
- '11111111'
- '22222222'
enabled: trueDon't forget to also enable the reporter.
Slack nofifications are configured using "Slack Incoming Webhooks". Here is a sample configuration:
slack:
webhook_url: 'https://hooks.slack.com/services/T50TXXXXXU/BDVYYYYYYY/PWTqwyFM7CcCfGnNzdyDYZ'
enabled: trueTo set up Slack, from you Slack Team, create a new app and activate "Incoming Webhooks" on a channel, you'll get a webhook URL, copy it into the configuration as seen above.
You can use the command urlwatch --test-slack to test if the Slack integration works.
You can have notifications sent to you through the Matrix protocol.
To achieve this, you first need to register a Matrix account for the bot on any homeserver.
You then need to acquire an access token and room ID, using the following instructions adapted from this guide:
- Open Riot.im in a private browsing window
- Register/Log in as your bot, using its user ID and password.
- Set the display name and avatar, if desired.
- In the settings page, scroll down to the bottom and click Access Token: <click to reveal>.
- Copy the highlighted text to your configuration.
- Join the room that you wish to send notifications to.
- Go to the Room Settings (gear icon) and copy the Internal Room ID from the bottom.
- Close the private browsing window but do not log out, as this invalidates the Access Token.
Here is a sample configuration:
matrix:
homeserver: https://matrix.org
access_token: "YOUR_TOKEN_HERE"
room_id: "!roomroomroom:matrix.org"You will probably want to use the following configuration for the markdown reporter, if you intend to post change
notifications to a public Matrix room, as the messages quickly become noisy:
markdown:
details: false
footer: false
minimal: trueIf the webpage you are trying to watch runs client-side JavaScript to render the page, Requests-HTML can now be used to render the page in a headless Chromium instance first and then use the HTML of the resulting page.
Use the browser kind in the configuration and the navigate key to set the
URL to retrieve. note that the normal url job keys are not supported
for the browser job types at the moment, for example:
kind: browser
name: "A Page With JavaScript"
navigate: http://example.org/You need to configure your GMail account to allow for "less secure" (password-based) apps to login:
- Go to https://myaccount.google.com/
- Click on "Sign-in & security"
- Scroll all the way down to "Allow less secure apps" and enable it
Now, start the configuration editor: urlwatch --edit-config
These are the keys you need to configure (see #158):
report/email/enabled:truereport/email/from:your.username@gmail.com(edit accordingly)report/email/method:smtpreport/email/smtp/host:smtp.gmail.comreport/email/smtp/keyring:truereport/email/smtp/port:587report/email/smtp/starttls:truereport/email/to: The e-mail address you want to send reports to
Now, for setting the password, it's not stored in the config file, but in your
keychain. To store the password, run: urlwatch --smtp-login and enter your
password.
While creating your filter pipeline, you might want to preview what the filtered
output looks like. You can do so by first configuring your job and then running
urlwatch with the --test-filter command, passing in the index (from --list)
or the URL/location of the job to be tested:
urlwatch --test-filter 1 # Test the first job in the list
urlwatch --test-filter https://example.net/ # Test the job with the given URL
The output of this command will be the filtered plaintext of the job, this is the output that will (in a real urlwatch run) be the input to the diff algorithm.
It is possible to add cookies to HTTP requests for pages that need it, the YAML syntax for this is:
url: http://example.com/
cookies:
Key: ValueForKey
OtherKey: OtherValueThis is an example how to watch the GitHub "releases" page for a given project for the latest release version, to be notified of new releases:
url: "https://github.com/thp/urlwatch/releases/latest"
filter:
- xpath: '(//div[contains(@class,"release-timeline-tags")]//h4)[1]/a'
- html2text: reBy default, XPath and CSS filters are set up for HTML documents. However, it is possible to use them for XML documents as well (these examples parse an RSS feed and filter only the titles and publication dates):
url: 'https://heronebag.com/blog/index.xml'
filter:
- xpath:
path: '//item/title/text()|//item/pubDate/text()'
method: xmlurl: 'https://heronebag.com/blog/index.xml'
filter:
- css:
selector: 'item > title, item > pubDate'
method: xml
- html2text: reMigration from urlwatch 1.x should be automatic on first start. Here is a quick rundown of changes in 2.0:
- URLs are stored in a YAML file now, with direct support for specifying names for jobs, different job kinds, directly applying filters, selecting the HTTP request method, specifying POST data as dictionary and much more
- The cache directory has been replaced with a SQLite 3 database file
"cache.db" in minidb format, storing all change history (use
--gc-cacheto remove old changes if you don't need them anymore) for further analysis - The hooks mechanism has been replaced with support for creating new job kinds by subclassing, new filters (also by subclassing) as well as new reporters (pieces of code that put the results somewhere, for example the default installation contains the "stdout" reporter that writes to the console and the "email" reporter that can send HTML and text e-mails)
- A configuration file - urlwatch.yaml - has been added for specifying user preferences instead of having to supply everything via the command line
Website: https://thp.io/2008/urlwatch/
E-Mail: m@thp.io